Unless otherwise indicated herein, the description in this section is not prior art to the claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
As a typical management system that manages an image forming apparatus, a management system that includes a plurality of image forming apparatuses arranged inside a common network, and a management server arranged outside this network to manage the image forming apparatuses has been known. In this management system, the image forming apparatus transmits information on the image forming apparatus to the management server. The information on the image forming apparatus includes, for example, information on remaining amounts of expendables in the image forming apparatus, information on presence/absence of a component needing to be replaced in the image forming apparatus, and information on abnormal occurrence in the image forming apparatus. Then, the management server manages the information on the image forming apparatus received from the image forming apparatus.